


Under Cover of Night

by The Librarina (tears_of_nienna)



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Graduate School, M/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 11:20:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13052970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tears_of_nienna/pseuds/The%20Librarina
Summary: Athelstan's neighbors keep him awake at night, but it isn't really their fault. University AU.





	Under Cover of Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meinposhbastard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meinposhbastard/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, meinposhbastard!

 I.

His neighbors are making love again.

The graduate student apartments are small and thin-walled, and their bed seems to be placed just on the other side of his living-room wall. They’re courteous enough to keep the headboard from banging, but the creak of the bed-frame and the occasional moans are more than enough.

So he slips a scribbled index card in his book to mark his place, puts on his sneakers, and leaves for a run.

It’s well after dark, and cold enough that the air burns in the back of his throat when he takes a deep breath. He sets off on the path that follows the river, winding around the edges of campus.

His embarrassment is not their fault. The hang-up is entirely his own, a vestige of his brief, disastrous stint at St. Cuthbert’s. He knows now that he wasn’t meant for that sort of life, but that doesn't mean he knows what sort of life he  _i_ _s_ meant for.

By the time he reaches the far end of the loop, there’s a stitch in his side, and it pulls his strides into a different rhythm— _thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not_ , he thinks, as he passes under streetlights and crosses the bridge over the sluggish, cold river below.

When he reaches the apartment building, there’s someone standing out front. They cup their hands around their face to light a cigarette, and the spark of the lighter glitters in deep blue eyes.

The man is tall and broad-shouldered and blond, and familiar too. He slows to catch his breath and finally places the memory: This is one of the neighbors he’d just gone on a run to avoid. The man's girlfriend—or wife, or whatever—is almost as tall as he is and just as imposing, although she’s always been polite when they pass in the hall.

He lowers his head and starts to walk past.

“Do we bother you?”

He startles at the sound of the voice, deep and just slightly accented. He turns around. “I’m sorry?”

“You live next door, yes? I have seen you before, running at night. And always after we...” He gestures vaguely with his cigarette. “Lagertha said that she heard you were a priest. So I wondered if we bothered you. We do not mean to.”

“I was never a priest,” he says, too fast and too sharp. “I was...almost a monk,” he explains, more calmly.

“And now you are a graduate student.”

“Yes.”

He braces for the next question—what happened, why did you leave, did you lose your faith.

“What do you study?”

It takes him a second to realize that the question isn’t one he expected. “Oh. Literature. Specifically the Christianization of pre-conversion texts. What about you?”

He gestures with the cigarette again, indicating...the river? Or the stars? “History. Sixth to twelfth centuries. Northern Europe.” He glances over, and his mouth tips up in a sly grin. “We intersect, don’t we? Between Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon.”

“I guess we do.”

He holds out a hand. “I’m Ragnar, by the way.”

“Ragnar. I’m Arthur.” It’s simpler than _Athelstan_ , anyway, and he’s grown tired of the explanations. Though with names like Ragnar and Lagertha, perhaps his neighbors would have taken it in stride.

He reaches out, and Ragnar’s hand practically engulfs his.

“Good to meet you, Arthur. We’ll try to be quieter next time.” He winks. “But I can’t make you any promises.”

 

 

II. 

Someone is knocking on the door. Arthur rouses himself from his work and scrubs a hand through his hair. It’s a mess, _he’s_ a mess, but what does that matter?

He opens the door, and wishes he’d cleaned up. Lagertha is standing in the doorway, and the sight of her makes his spine straighten without conscious thought. “Hi,” he ventures.

She smiles. “Hello. Ragnar says you study literature?”

“Yes,” he says, because it’s true, and because what else are you supposed to say to a six-foot-tall woman at your door, with her hair braided back like a mohawk?

“Then you are good at—grammar, and things, yes?”

“Pretty good, yeah.” Pride is a sin; false modesty probably is, too, but it’s not one of the deadly ones, so he errs on the side of understatement.

“Ragnar and I—our English is good, but sometimes in the writing, things get confused. And Ragnar’s professor is...” Her breath hisses between her teeth. “There are no words for him. He will take any excuse to berate Ragnar, and it is upsetting to him, though he pretends it is not. We thought, perhaps, if there were no mistakes in the papers...”

“Then at least he wouldn’t be able to find fault with that,” Arthur finishes.

“Yes.”

“I’d be happy to look them over for you.”

When she smiles, her whole face lights up with it. “We would be grateful. And we would pay you.”

“You don’t have to pay me.”

“Yes, we do,” she says firmly. “Twenty dollars a paper—it is worth that and more, to keep Haraldson at bay.”

“Five,” Arthur says.

She shakes her head. “You are very bad at bargaining.”

“I don’t want money for it. I’m happy to help.” He wonders, suddenly, if he’s being rude by refusing, but he doesn’t know what else to say.

“If you insist,” Lagertha says. She steps back, like she’s about to leave, but then she pauses. “Ragnar says that you go running at night.”

“Sometimes.”

“Do we disturb you?”

“Oh—no, not at all,” he says, and he’d sooner damn himself with the lie before he would admit the truth.

“Good. Would you like to join us, then?”

“Join—” Arthur’s words die on his tongue. She cannot mean...

“Ragnar likes you, and I see why, now. We are not selfish with each other. If you wished to sleep with us, or with one of us, the other would not object.”

In his shock, Arthur cannot even find the words to respond. Eventually Lagertha takes pity on him.

“If I bring you the papers tomorrow, will you look over them?”

“Of course.”

* * *

The papers aren’t terrible, just the mistakes any non-native speaker might make. Idioms that don’t quite translate, occasional Danish words substituted for an English cognate. He doesn’t understand the substance much—especially Lagertha’s astrophysics essays—but that’s not what he was asked to do, anyway.

When he’s finished, he gathers up the papers and walks down the hall to their door.

He remembers abruptly what Lagertha had offered him. _Would you like to join us_? she’d said. Arthur freezes with his hand already raised, wondering if his knock will be misconstrued. If he _wants_ it to be misconstrued.

He gathers himself and taps on the door.

It’s Ragnar, not Lagertha, who answers the door. The sweater he’s wearing is gray, and it looks both heavy and soft.

Arthur holds out the sheaf of papers. “Lagertha asked me to look these over for you both. I marked the mistakes.”

Ragnar grins at him and takes the papers from him. “You do not know how much you are helping us.”

“It’s nothing, honestly.” It’s nice, sometimes, to read things in modern English, without thorns and eths and caesurae. He turns to go, but Ragnar speaks up.

“Lagertha said she propositioned you.”

Arthur turns around, scrambling to explain himself. “I—she—”

“She also said you responded like that.”

Arthur rolls his eyes. “Wonderful.”

“She meant it, though. And so do I. And if there is anything  _else_  we can do to repay you for your help, simply ask.”

* * *

It goes on that way for a while. They bring him papers to edit, and in return they fuss over him like friends, telling him to sleep more, taking him out to dinner when he won’t accept their payment. The first time he hears Lagertha really laugh, it’s like a revelation.

He stops going for late-night runs when he hears them next door. Instead, he lies very still in bed and curls his hands into fists until his fingernails leave little crescent-moon marks on his palms. After a long while, the urge to take himself in hand goes away, and he can sleep.

But sometime deep in the chill of winter, he forgets to try to fight it.

 

 

III.

The knock on his door comes just after eleven. By rights, Arthur should be asleep, considering how long it’s been since he last slept, but the only people who would knock on his door this late know him better than that.

He saves his work out of habit, although he’s added a dozen words at best in the last half-hour, and gets up to answer the door.

It’s Lagertha tonight, and her eyes are troubled.

“What’s wrong?” Arthur asks.

“He’s sitting up on the roof again.”

He knows who she means, and he can guess why. “Haraldson?”

She sneers. “Who else?”

“What did he do this time?”

“Who knows? He is such a...petty man,” she says. “He has never liked Ragnar or his ideas.”

“I know.” Lagertha’s boyfriend has radical ideas about history and myth, about the way that both can echo through to the present and the future. But the head of his department is deeply traditional, and feels threatened by anything or anyone that might represent a change. Ragnar has run afoul of Dr. Haraldson a dozen times, and those are only the stories Arthur has heard so far.

“Did you go up to get him?” he asks.

Her smile is wry, but tinged with fondness. “He will not come down for me,” she says. Her accent, like Ragnar’s, thickens a little when they talk about each other. It’s one of the many things that endeared them to him, when they first met. “He knows all of my tricks. But he does not know yours, I think.”

“Mine? Lagertha, I don’t have any tricks.”

“You do. Perhaps you only do not know it yet.”

Arthur doubts that very much. He isn’t one for guile or even much strategy. He’s even terrible at Monopoly.

“I cannot stay,” Lagertha says. “I’m assigned to run the lab tonight. Will you go and talk to him?”

“Of course I will.”

Lagertha smiles, and a little bit of the tension leaves her shoulders. “Thank you, Arthur.”

 

Arthur closes down his laptop and puts his boots on. He considers the draft that always lurks around the kitchen window, and reaches for his coat. Ragnar, he knows, will not have brought a coat with him. Neither he nor Lagertha ever seems to feel the cold the way that Arthur does.

He lets his apartment door lock itself behind him, and then he climbs the last two flights of stairs up to the top floor.

The roof is strictly off-limits to everyone except maintenance staff: it says so in sharp black capitals on the sign taped to the door. But the door has never been locked, and the ladder it conceals has been climbed so many times over the decades that the paint is flaking off of it, leaving chips and flecks of old red paint like dried blood in the lines of Arthur’s palms.

When he pushes on the cold metal of the trapdoor, it rises easily, and he climbs the rest of the way up. He tries to close it carefully, but it slips from his fingers and lands with an echoing _bang_ anyway. It’s at that moment that he realizes he has no idea what he’s going to say to Ragnar.

“Is this a private rooftop, or can anyone join?” Arthur calls out, feeling a little foolish.

A shadow near the far edge shifts, just slightly. “You know that you’re always welcome,” Ragnar says.

And he does. Ragnar and Lagertha had been kind enough to make that clear from the start, when he worried that he was more of a nuisance than a friend. He still worries about that, but not as much as he once did.

They’ve also made it clear that his welcome extends to their bedroom, that he could sleep with one or both of them, should he so desire. He had blushed hot when they first made the offer, too fresh from the monastery to even choke out a denial. After, Lagertha had apologized for unnerving him, but had assured him in the same words that Ragnar used now on the roof—that he was always welcome.

He has not even allowed himself to consider it.

Arthur crosses the roof to where Ragnar is sitting. His legs are stretched out in front of him, and he’s leaning back on his hands, looking up at the sky above the campus buildings. His profile is a darker shape against the sky, and Arthur tries not to look too long when he sits beside Ragnar.

He draws his knees up to his chest to keep out the chill.

“So,” he says. “What happened?”

“Fucking Haraldson,” Ragnar answers, but Arthur already knew that. So he waits. If he prods at Ragnar, it will only irritate him, but if he gives Ragnar the silence he needs, he’ll fill in the blanks himself.

For a moment they sit together on the rooftop, side by side with the dark and the bitter wind for company.

“He does not understand,” Ragnar says at last. “History is a dead thing to him. He does not see how the writer changes the stories, and the stories change their writers. It is all numbers and battle-maps, troop movements and assassinations. He does not see beyond that.”

Arthur isn’t sure that _he_ sees beyond it, either, but it doesn’t matter. He’s had these conversations with Ragnar before, and it’s always over his head, but he doesn’t mind. Their dissertations parallel each other; Ragnar writes about the histories, and Arthur about the literature after the conquest. Once, Ragnar walked into Arthur’s apartment, grabbed a book off his shelf, and walked out again, pausing only long enough to ruffle Arthur’s hair.

(Arthur had stolen the book back again, but not until he knew they were both gone. He has never been a bold man.)

“What did he do?” Arthur ventures, after a moment’s silence.

“He rejected my dissertation.”

“ _Rejected_ \--?” It’s worse than Arthur thought. If Haraldson is making him scrap the entire project, then that’s two years of research gone. Two years of work, two years of funding, two years on Ragnar’s student visa...

“That is what he said. Unless I change my thesis entirely. He thinks my argument is one for ‘political science,’ not history. That I should change departments if I want to write it. The old fool should know better than that. History is never content to stay in the past.”

Arthur racks his brains for something, anything, that might be helpful. “You could talk to the dean of the graduate program. Haraldson can’t let you get two years into your dissertation and just flat-out _reject_ it. If it was going wrong, he should have told you before now.”

“He did. But he’s _wrong_. I know I am right, and that is why I kept going. But now he will put a stop to it all, if he can.” He sighs. “This would be so much simpler if you could still challenge a man to single combat.”

It sounds like a joke, but Arthur is fairly certain that Ragnar is serious. He glances over at Ragnar. “Well, at least he didn’t fault you for grammar, did he?”

There’s a brief white flash of teeth; Ragnar’s face cracks into a smile for the space of a heartbeat. “Not a single misplaced comma,” he assures Arthur. “I owe you a drink.”

“I told you, you don’t owe me anything. I was glad to help. And I don’t really drink, anyway. I embarrass myself when I do.”

“Not that kind of drink. The coffee shop you like, with the hats on the wall and the terrible music—you have a tab there, now. Lagertha and I will pay it at the end of the year.”

Arthur stares at him, his profile etched in moonlight. “You can _do_ that?”

“No,” Ragnar says, unconcerned. Of course he can’t do that, it’s not how things work...but he did it anyway. Arthur wonders sometimes if Ragnar understands how truly remarkable that is.

A particularly cold wind gusts across the roof, eddying in the corners of the roof where the chill is deepest. Arthur holds his body rigid to hide a shiver.

“You should go inside. It’s cold.”

“I’m fine,” Arthur lies. “You’re not even wearing a coat.”

Ragnar snorts. “This weather is like spring for us. It never gets cold enough here,” he chides, like Arthur had something to do with it. “Or perhaps it is the wrong kind of cold. There is a smell to it, of snow and pine and woodsmoke...”

“You miss it.”

Ragnar nods, just a shift of his profile in the darkness.

Arthur understands. There is a comfort in belonging. He left the monastery of his own accord, unable to reconcile his faith with his knowledge of himself. But even after the faith seeped out of him, the ritual of the Mass was reassurance in itself. He hasn’t been to church in a year now; he doesn’t know if he’s afraid that God will be angry with him, or that God will not care.

Maybe the Norse had it right, with their many gods. Tricksters and warriors and healers; men and women and those who were both. Surely anyone could find a god to honor, in such a pantheon as that.

It’s blasphemy, and Arthur has to fight a very real urge to cross himself. He turns back to Ragnar instead. “Freezing to death won’t please anyone except Haraldson,” he says. “You have to come inside. You need to eat something—and sleep.”

“ _I_ need to sleep?” Ragnar counters. “What is the meaning of this, then?” He lifts one hand and traces the pad of his thumb over the shadow beneath Arthur’s right eye.

The gentle sweep of his knuckles across Arthur’s cheek burns like a brand. He finds that Ragnar is looking at him steadily, from a distance that seems both too near and much, much too far. Arthur drops his gaze, and when he blinks, his eyelashes brush against Ragnar’s thumb in a way that is suddenly, shockingly intimate.

When Ragnar’s hand falls away, the warmth of his skin lingers for a moment before fading.

When Arthur finds his voice, it is uncertain and unsteady, as though he has just run all the way across campus. “I had to consult with a library in Italy this morning,” he says. “They have the oldest extant copy of ‘The Dream of the Rood,’ and I had a couple of questions. And, well...time zones,” he finishes vaguely.

But Ragnar is shaking his head. “It isn’t only tonight. You work yourself too hard. If not for Lagertha and I, you would never leave your apartment except for classes.”

Ragnar isn’t wrong, but Arthur doesn’t know how to do anything else but throw himself, body and soul, into his work. If he keeps working, he doesn’t have time for anything else—for thinking or wondering or fighting the urge to knock on Ragnar and Lagertha’s door and take them up on their offer. He wakes, he works, and eventually he sleeps. It is exhausting, yes, but there is a peace to it as well.

But it’s getting harder not to _think_. He curls in on himself, turning away from Ragnar. “I didn’t...I didn’t think it showed. I didn’t think anyone noticed.”

“I noticed,” Ragnar counters. “I notice you, Arthur.”

His face burns hot again, in spite of the icy breeze. Ragnar notices _him_? Why? Why, out of all of the people in this university, in this town, would _he_ be the one that draws Ragnar’s attention?

He does not know what to think about this. His love for Lagertha is nearer to fealty than lust; he would sooner go to war for her than go to bed with her. What he feels for Ragnar is less simple, a Gordian knot composed of threads he cannot name, and he lacks the courage of Alexander to cut to its heart.

Or does he? Sitting beside Ragnar on the rooftop, things are beginning to come clear. Perhaps this was what Lagertha meant, when she spoke of tricks. But this does not feel like a trick; it feels like the simplest answer, a test for which he’s spent years preparing.

Arthur leans close and presses his lips to Ragnar’s.

Ragnar makes the smallest sound of surprise, and then he leans forward, tipping his face to one side to change the angle of the kiss. Arthur’s hands settle on Ragnar’s shoulders, and Ragnar slides his hands into Arthur’s hair, a tangle that had never been meant for a monk’s tonsure.

This kiss is not the reason he left the monastery, not truly, but he has never been more at peace with his choice.

Ragnar pulls back. “What is it you want, Arthur?”

He does not have the words to say it, so he kisses Ragnar again.

They do not speak; they do not need to. Ragnar’s hands roam across Arthur’s body—his chest, his hips, his hair. Despite the wind, Arthur feels warmer than he has in months.

When Ragnar finally pulls away, Arthur’s face feels raw and hot from the scrape of Ragnar’s beard.

Ragnar rises to his feet and holds out a hand to draw Arthur up. “Come,” he says. “It is too cold for you out here, and you are tired. You will come home with me, and you will sleep.”

Arthur lets himself be pulled to his feet. “Sleep?” he asks. His heart sinks a little. Had he done something wrong? Was he mistaken about what Ragnar wanted? “But I thought...”

Ragnar’s smile is sharp as a blade. “You were right. But we will sleep, too. Eventually.”

**Author's Note:**

>   * Title from a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer.”
>   * Arthur’s thesis topic definitely isn’t based on the one that I would write if I ever went back to grad school.
>   * I thought Earl Haraldson would make an excellent hidebound professor, the kind who got tenure in the last century and has absolutely no interest in new schools of criticism. I also have never met any professors like this, ever.
> 



End file.
